VOA · As It Is
Intermediate · B1–B2learner speed3:032025-02-14public domain
As It Is is VOA Learning English's daily news magazine. Each report covers a current story in clear, learner-speed English with a controlled vocabulary — the closest thing to real news broadcasts that intermediate learners can fully digest, and ideal raw material for dictation.
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01The inventor Thomas Alva Edison had a major effect on the lives of people around the world.
02Thomas Edison is remembered most for the electric light, his phonograph, and his work with motion pictures.
03Edison was born on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio.
04He was mostly self-taught.
05His mother taught him reading, writing, and mathematics.
06He learned from books, and he experimented.
07At the age of ten, he experimented with chemicals and electricity.
08He built a telegraph machine and, at the age of sixteen, he went to work as a telegraph operator.
09He continued his work with electricity, making improved telegraph machines, and he invented an electrical voting machine.
10Edison earned enough money from his early inventions to start his own company in 1871.
11Instead of working alone, he worked with a group of employees on many different projects at one time.
12They asked the United States government for patents to protect more than one hundred devices or inventions each year.
13He was an extremely busy man.
14In 1913, a popular magazine at the time called Thomas Edison the most useful man in America.
15He almost never slept more than four or five hours a night.
16He usually worked eighteen hours each day because he enjoyed what he was doing.
17A reporter asked Edison in 1917 which of his many inventions he enjoyed the most.
18He answered, the phonograph was really the most interesting.
19The hardest invention to develop, he said, was the electric light.
20He said that it was the most difficult and the most important.
21He also invented the modern motion picture film.
22In 1928, he received a special medal of honor from the Congress of the United States.
23Thomas Edison died on January 6, 1931.
24People worldwide have had easier and more enjoyable lives because of his inventions.
25I'm John Russell.
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